Subjective and objective evaluation of two types of dialogues in acall assistance service

摘要

Menu-based or system driven dialogues are widely used ininterfaces to telephone services. The communication structure theyimpose on the customer differs from human-human dialogues, where controland initiative can switch from one partner to the other. It has oftenbeen claimed that mixed initiative dialogues could improve the userfriendliness and efficiency of spoken language interfaces. In this paperwe investigate whether mixed initiative dialogues do indeed outperformsystem driven dialogues as interface to a relatively simple service,i.e. a call assistance service that gives access to a small number ofcompanies and agencies through a single premium rate access number.Results show that mixed initiative dialogues are not faster, nor morecomfortable than system driven dialogues, at least in this service. Wediscuss possible explanations for our findings